A Bookmarked Death

Dedication

To the memory of Ignatz—because a cat is never just a cat.

Contents

Chapter One

A
LTHOUGH
I
RARELY
garden, I was conscious of spring that May because of the winter we had just endured—the worst on Long Island in one hundred years according to the
New York Times.
I watched the daffodils push out of the earth, crowding each other like shoppers at a Black Friday sale. I cataloged every flame and crimson tulip as it appeared. The ice on the pond had melted quietly away, and walking out to my Book Barn that early morning I caught darting glimpses of orange and gold fish.

It promised to be a beautiful Sunday, though there was no slacking off for people with a small business to run. Mine was called Secondhand Prose. The more used and rare books I could describe on the Internet, the more I could almost make a living. Tracking down unusual volumes, investigating their origins, then finding the people who wanted them had never lost its charm. I captured books as rare as Siberian tigers, common as barnyard kittens, and found good homes for them all.

Delhi Laine, Book Rescue?

The barn and the farmhouse closer to the street had been bequeathed to the nearby university in the 1970s and offered to us as a rental since my husband, Colin, taught there. On rainy days the barn still held the comforting odor of cows, but the animals were long gone. The rough-hewn room now held a long library table with my laptop, a landline phone, and piles of books to be listed for sale. The floor was covered with threadbare Oriental rugs from the Methodist parsonage where I grew up, and I had tacked René Magritte and Frida Kahlo posters to the walls. About seven thousand volumes waited in cartons and on bookshelves.

That Sunday morning I brought a carton of vintage children’s picture books over to list on the Internet. But before retrieving
Nurse Nancy
, a Golden Book with the bandages miraculously intact, I clicked on the
Newsday
Web site—a familiar delaying tactic. Although Long Island has hosted such sensations as the Amityville Horror, relatively little happens in Suffolk County. But today I stared at the lead story:

FIRE DESTROYS SOUTHAMPTON MANSION: TWO DIE

The fire had started in the early hours of Sunday morning on South Main Street, the fashionable thoroughfare that led from the village down to the Atlantic Ocean. By the time the police and fire department arrived, the house was too badly burned to save the owners, Dr. Ethan Crosley, an archeologist who taught at Brown University, and his wife, Sheila. Evidently they had returned from their estate in Barbados to attend the college graduation of their daughter, Elisa.

The white letters on the blue background waved and bounced like schoolchildren vying to be chosen. What I was reading was impossible. I closed my eyes and waited for the typeface to settle down. Then I looked again and scrolled down the page, disbelieving, snatching at words.
Gasoline, torched, arson.
There had been another fire in the neighborhood in April, a vacant house, as many of the homes on South Main Street were before Memorial Day when the season began. The Arson Squad was focusing on individuals with a known compulsion to set fires.

I was staring at the photograph of the large, once-beautiful clapboard house, now a lopsided ruin, when the phone rang, jerking me in my chair. I saw by the caller ID that it was my youngest daughter, Hannah, and picked up the receiver quickly.

“Hey, Hani.” I kept my voice easy though I was sure I knew why she was calling.

“
Mom?
Mom, the most terrible thing happened.” Her voice was shaky, and I knew she was fighting not to cry.

“You mean the fire, the Crosleys? I know, honey, I just saw it online.”

“But how could something like that happen? How could Elisa’s parents just be dead? They said it happened in Southampton.” There was a trace of accusation in her voice, almost as if I had lured them to Long Island and struck the match myself. I knew she didn’t believe that, she was just struggling to make sense of the tragedy. Still, it was well-known that the Crosleys were not my favorite people.

“But why were they in Southampton?” I asked.

She snuffled. “She said her grandparents had a vacation house there and they left it to her father. She spent summers there. Imagine, she was here on Long Island too!” Then she remembered the present. “Mom, it was so
awful.
We were just going out to breakfast, joking around about the weird pancake flavors at IHOP when this man and woman came up to us. They asked who we were and made us go back up to my room. One of Elisa’s dorm mates told the police she was visiting me at Cornell, so they asked police here to tell us about the fire.”

Hannah stopped then, but I held myself back from demanding to know what happened next.

Finally she sighed. “I didn’t know
what
to do. Elisa was screaming that it wasn’t true, that things like that didn’t happen to her parents, I thought she was going to start
hitting
the guy. Then she just began to cry and I kept on hugging her. The policewoman wanted to call a doctor, but Elisa wouldn’t let her.”

“Is she with you now?”

“Yes. She wants to talk to you.”

Oh, God.
What could I say about the Crosleys? I had to think of something for Elisa’s sake. But it was complicated because the Crosleys weren’t her biological parents. Hannah was her twin sister. I was her mother.

A
S
SOON
AS
I got off the phone with Elisa, I dialed my husband, Colin. Her father. My conversation with her had been perfunctory. I kept telling her how sorry I was; she kept vowing to find out who set the fire and asking me to help her, based on some detective work I had done in the past. I couldn’t imagine it but I promised her I would.

Sometimes Colin put his phone on vibrate and I had to leave a message. The surest way to get his attention was to text him, but this was not a subject for badly spelled phrases.

This morning he answered right away. “Hey-lo.”

“It’s me. Have you seen the news today?”

“I’ve been
writing
.” When Colin was working on a new poem, God Himself would have had to send a text. Although his livelihood was teaching archeology and supervising digs, he had been writing poetry for as long as I’d known him. One of his volumes had actually been nominated for a Pulitzer.

“It’s Ethan and Sheila. They
died.
In a fire in Southampton.” I found I was gasping out the words. “Ethan and Sheila are dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hannah called me. And I saw it on the
Newsday
site. You need to come over. We need to talk.”

Chapter Two

B
Y
THE
TIME
Colin arrived, I was back in the farmhouse, making coffee. He came through the kitchen door looking like Santa Claus in the tropics, his Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts already rumpled. He was a good-sized man and pleased about it, accepting his mound of stomach as evidence of his gravitas. He had also cultivated a generosity of spirit, and his students, rarely glimpsing his steely interior, adored him. I had fallen under his spell for a long time myself.

We sat down at the table and I poured coffee from the fancy glass French press, a Christmas gift from our oldest daughter, Jane. It looked as out of place on the scarred oak wood as disgraced royalty forced to consort with commoners. Our kitchen actually looked like a time warp from the Smithsonian. It had been the beating heart of our family for over twenty years, but nothing had been updated during that time. The harvest gold appliances worked sporadically, the garishly speckled black countertop still made me think of Mardi Gras celebrations, and the 1850s oak plank floor and kitchen table were original.

This was the room where, a year ago last October, Colin had informed me that “a man can’t dance with a wife who hides his shoes,” and moved out to rejoin the celebration.

“So Ethan and Sheila were incinerated,” he said, lightening his coffee with half-and-half. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer couple.”

“Colin!” I was shocked to hear him say what I’d only thought. “It’s a terrible way to die.”

“They were terrible people.” But he read reproof in my comment because he added, “
You’re
the one who wanted to see them get what they deserved. Speaking objectively, it’s not like the world lost Howard Carter or Louis Leakey. Ethan was a good archeologist, but inconsistent. He was always taking leaves of absence to fund private digs, then never telling anybody what he’d found. That’s suspicious right there. And speaking personally, he was a terrible friend.”

“I know. Do you want a bagel?”

“Cream cheese?”

“I think so.” I stood up and went to the refrigerator. “Anyway, Elisa is devastated.”

“Of course she is. She grew up thinking they were her parents.”

“But once she found out that they weren’t, that they had
stolen
her from us . . .”

“C’mon, Del.” He tipped back in the ancient wooden chair, a habit that made me fear it wouldn’t make it to two hundred. “You thought that once we found Elisa and told her, you’d fall into each other’s arms and the past would be magically erased?”

“Of course not!” That’s exactly what I’d thought. “I knew there’d be adjustments. I just didn’t expect there’d be this barrier between us.”

He eyed me like a student who was missing the point. “The ‘barrier’ was because you were insisting on bringing in the police and seeing the Crosleys punished. She didn’t want that.”

“Well, that can’t happen now.” I brought the plastic bag from the freezer to the counter and extracted two poppy seed bagels. “Now it’s up to God.”

Nineteen years ago a group of young archeology professors and their families had been hosted at a six-week conference in England. I had been a distracted young mother with three little girls and a fourth baby due in two months. Sheila and Ethan Crosley, wealthy with no children, had become secretly enamored of one of our two-year-old twins and decided they had to have her. Not only had they stolen her in a way that made everyone believe she had drowned in the Avon River in Stratford, they had changed our family’s life forever. They had destroyed my relationship with Colin and hijacked our future plans. If we couldn’t even protect the children we already had . . .

Colin and I didn’t talk again until I had toasted the bagels and brought them over to the table, along with the butter and cream cheese. Then we conducted a wake for Ethan and Sheila Crosley. Of sorts.

“I don’t understand why you were ever best friends,” I said.

He shrugged. “Ethan was different when I met him in grad school. We were interested in the same things and he had a wicked sense of humor. He didn’t have time for people who didn’t meet his standards, of course.” Ethan’s parents had inherited a thriving farm machinery company in Pennsylvania, which they then turned into a national concern. Ethan had been an unexpected and adored only child.

“I never thought he was anything special when I met him in Stratford,” I objected. Ethan had been tall and rangy with tight red curls. I was one of the people he hadn’t had time for. “So what changed him?”

Colin pursed his mouth. “I don’t know. Maybe life. Sheila was always very ambitious. But it was more. Even when I first knew him he was restless, looking for the thing that would make him truly happy.”

That sounded like the human condition to me. But Colin stared into his coffee cup as if an analysis of Ethan was written there. “He had his reasons, of course.”

“Such as?”

He looked over at me, his eyes as blue as his twin daughters’ but set in the weathered lines of a man in his late fifties. “He’s dead now, so I guess it doesn’t matter. He had testicular cancer as a teenager. He never told me the details, but I know there were certain side effects. Back then they didn’t know as much about treatment.”

“Yikes.”

Colin nodded. “Sterility and impaired function, at least. So he focused on other things.”

“Why didn’t you
tell
me?”

“He made me promise not to mention it to anyone. I think afterward he was sorry he had told me.”

But I was your wife.
The old lament. “No wonder they resented us for procreating like rabbits. But didn’t Sheila mind about . . .”

Colin smoothed the cream cheese on his bagel with a finger. Since it was just us, I hadn’t bothered with plates and silverware. “I guess the money made up for it. Lots of people who
can
have kids don’t want them. They could go anywhere, afford anything. ”

“And never let us forget it.” The Crosleys had not stayed in our barebones academic housing, but in a stylish inn several miles away. They came by only to pick up Colin for dinner several times a week, since we weren’t renting a car ourselves. On the pretext that the men would be discussing archeology, I was always excluded.

At first the other wives on the archeology project had tried to include Sheila. But she never stopped flaunting her black-haired beauty and superior way of life. While the rest of us were boasting about shrewd tag sale buys and defending the nutritional value of hot dogs added to mac and cheese, Sheila was traveling to London for concerts and house parties. The tactfulness that the rest of us had developed was lost on Sheila. She said whatever she felt like saying.

I remembered a conversation one late afternoon when she and Ethan had stopped by for Colin. Several of us, friends now, were sitting on lawn chairs on the grass while our children played nearby. Sheila had walked over wearing something lacy and white, something that could have been photographed for
Vogue
. Her dark hair was pulled back with a big bow. After saying hello, she’d stared at my three daughters, at their faded overalls and faces that were grubby and ice cream–stained after a day of hard play.

“What a waste. If they were
my
children, they wouldn’t go around looking like they lived in a slum.”

A moment of shock, then my new friend Anna said, “If they were your children, you’d be too busy to hang around envying Delhi. If you want kids, have some of your own.”

Then I’d added, God help me, “Yeah, Sheila. Money can’t buy everything.”

“And you know that because?” A flash of dark brown eyes was the only indication I had gotten to her. “You have a lot to learn.” Then she noticed Ethan beckoning and left.

As Sheila was leaving, Anna had muttered, “Who died and made her first lady?”

Had that been the catalyst for everything? The moment that Elisa’s future was decided? Thinking about it now stopped my breath. It would have had to be Elisa, of course. She had stood out from the band of children like Venus outshining the stars. Not even three, she had been precocious, high-spirited, engaging.
Everybody’s darling
.

But I couldn’t take credit for fostering Elisa’s charm. Growing up I had never pictured myself as anybody’s mother. My sister, Patience, had fantasies about being rich, but I had been lost in books, wishing I were in any of the places I was reading about rather than New Jersey. Colin had promised me wonderful experiences and traveling the world, and I’d pictured us as famous adventurers, a husband-and-wife team making wondrous discoveries. But once Jane was born, he’d fantasized a whole tribe of children in our wake, children who needed care and feeding and clean laundry.

If we hadn’t lost Elisa, we might have had six or seven.

I wasn’t ever sorry that we’d had the ones we did; I was more disbelieving that, still in my forties, I had four young adult children with experiences I didn’t know about and different opinions than mine. Sometimes I wondered if I was in the wrong novel.

I brought myself back to the present. “You’ve actually been in that Southampton house—haven’t you?”

Colin’s head jerked, then he sighed, as if it pained him to be reminded of his lost friendship with Ethan. “A hundred years ago.”

“But you could find it again?”

He looked scornful. “After a fire, it shouldn’t be hard.”

For a brilliant man, Colin wasn’t very practical.

“I’m talking about before the fire.”

“Why would I?”

To make sure Ethan and Sheila got the punishment they deserved?

But that was absurd. If killing people was not my style, it was Colin’s even less. Though he had once grabbed our son Jason by the shoulders in anger, he had never laid a hand on the girls. His way of punishing Ethan would have been to make trouble for him at Brown or report his theft of antiquities to the Society for American Archaeology. “Do you think Ethan crossed any lines as an archeologist?”

Colin snorted. “I
know
he did. Probably had governments all over the world gunning for him. He used to pass out money like Mars Bars on digs and walk away with whatever he pleased. That was why he never reported finding anything.”

“Really? With all the safeguards they have? And he got away with it? How come you never said anything?” Shocked, I machine-gunned him with questions. “He couldn’t have been doing it for the money.”

“I think it was a game he was playing, to see how far he could go. Not that wealthy people don’t always want more. But in the past few years he’s come under suspicion and I haven’t heard of him going out in the field. Probably he’s moved on to some other scheme.”

I brought my last bite of bagel to my mouth, then brought it down again. What if some angry investigator had trailed Ethan to the Southampton house and broken in to steal back his country’s archeological treasures? I had heard of obsessed investigators keeping people under surveillance for years. Perhaps they had come to the end of their patience, taken their artifacts, then decided to set the fire for revenge.
A tooth for a tooth.
It was more comforting to blame a band of outraged Egyptians or Syrians than to imagine coming under blame ourselves. Not that we would—throughout our search for Elisa, Colin had insisted on complete secrecy—but we did have reasons to exact revenge ourselves.

Especially since the kidnapping had happened in England and I was having trouble getting the American authorities interested. Once, feeling frustrated, I had tried to pressure Colin. “We have to let people know what they’ve done. Tell Nancy Grace or someone like that. Then the FBI and the police would have no choice but to—”

“
No
, Delhi, we agreed on no publicity! We’re not going there. You think Elisa wants everyone knowing her life story? And ours? I’m not going to be known as the guy who was duped by his best friend. Once the media get hold of it, they’ll
never
leave us alone. We’ll handle this our own way.”

Now, sitting there, I had the first frisson of uneasiness about what Colin might have considered solving the problem his “own way.”